"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
news:jIWdnTAJRs3L4w_QnZ2dnUVZ_h-
"Robert Green" wrote:

Are you saying that if the US Congress put their mind to it they
*couldn't*
close the loopholes that allow companies to move offshore so easily?
Not
that they ever would, but in light of their threats to claw back the
obscene
AIG bonuses, it seems that they might indeed have the power to pass laws
saying "You can leave, but it's going to cost you dearly." I'd have no
heartache with making American companies that built their fortune here
leave
a lot of it at the door when they leave. I would feel better about than
then dissolving bargaining agreements and union busting. Teachers
aren't
playing off-shore keep-away with the IRS but they're the ones paying for
companies that do.

I don't know. It would be a very interesting World Trade Court (or
whatever they call it) case. Teachers aren't paying for anything more
than other wise.

I know a few teachers and they feel very much under attack. If you recall,
in Wisconsin they singled out teacher's unions but left police and
firefighters out of the legislation to end collective bargaining for public
employees. That seems, to teachers at least, to imply that the state's
money woes came from overpaying teachers. Why would they select them and
not firefighters or police?

As you are probably aware, the Swiss are under assault for their refusal
to
reveal account holders and amounts of money held there for US citizens
(and
probably corporation slush funds, too) to the IRS. There's is/was an
amnesty for people to self-report those assets and interest payments
under a
new law and threatened prosecutions and steep penalties for those who
did
not self-report. If Congress wanted to, they could close the Cayman
offshore tax havens. But that would step on some pretty important toes.
That's the direction we should be moving in, not harassing teachers.
The
rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer and that's not been a very
good
formula for societal stability.

But that is hardly new. Actually a lot of the concentration of the
wealth is directly related to Congress messing with something it doesn;t
understand (economics) and taxes. For instance almost every major CEO
gets $1 mill or so in salary. Why? Because that is what the tax laws say
is the most that can be deducted. However, in their zeal to "reign in"
executive compensation and make the executive's interests in line with
stockholders, they tax advantaged stock options and bonuses. So, instead
of being paid a certain amount to actually run the company, they are now
being paid to run the books. The best example was a Merrill dude just
before the crash who was getting $300,000 in salary and $300 mill in
options and "Performance based bonuses".

Congress does a lot of things to make people *think* something's being done
about a problem when in fact they've just changed "happy" to "glad." No
one ever follows up to see whether the changes to the law have really had
any effect. For example the threat to claw back AIG bonuses went exactly
nowhere, but it made at least some people feel something was being done.
Your example proves the point. Corporate compensation is completely out of
whack because the real owners of these companies, the stockholders, have
virtually no input as to how execs are compensated. Performance based
bonuses are a sham - CEO's get them whether they perform or not and the only
time it doesn't happen is when they do something so extreme that they feel
forced to decline their bonuses rather than being tarred and feathered by
the press and the public - thereby causing the stock price to drop and
reducing the non-salary compensation.

Saw a rather interesting study late last year. Noted that you can
relate a increase in the intensity of the wealth divide to the time a
Dem Congress passed this law. It was happening before, but it speeded
up.
Also a new CBO study in todays WSJ that showed the really (top 1%)
rich's income went down more than 2x as much as the other 99%.

We're back at the "food prices quintupling while wages only doubled" example
cited earlier. The ultra rich losing half their wealth has relatively no
effect on their lifestyle while someone in the lowest bracket losing half
their wealth means serious deprivation. In other words, the very rich can
very much afford big losses while wage earners usually can not.

a
Actually most of are suggesting that GE should not get any tax
breaks
relative to their competitors. Rather we are largely saying that their
competitors shouldn't have to pay either.

And that's going to bring down the national debt? The deficit has risen
BECAUSE so many big companies play fast and loose with the tax laws - or
have them changed to suit them.

Not really. Look at the stat abstract of the US at the Tax
expenditures, what the IRS calls these things, youy are out of the top
10 until you get one for the companies. The three biggest are the
deduction for health insurance (which is a deduction for the individual
even though the company takes it), the mortgage deduction, and exclusion
a person's pension benefits. The first purely company deduction is 10
and it only about 1/6 of the mortgage deduction. The next is 17. Look at
actual figures and they just don't match up. THe deferral of income from
controlled corporations is an anemic 18t at 7440 millions (that is the
way the chart says it and so did I to make sure I did not add extra
zeroes. (The mortgage deduction alone costs 76030 millions.)

But the mortgage deduction had the effect of encouraging home ownership and
that built wealth - the wealth that investment banks were falling all over
themselves to securitize and sell, driving the real estate bubble to burst
wide open. Giving tax breaks to corporations usually means that a very few
people at the top of the corporate pyramid get the money. Yes, some
companies do invest and pay dividends to their stockholders, but the trend
has been more and more obscene compensation for the guys at the top and very
little trickle down for anyone else.

If lowering the tax rate stimulates growth, why not give citizens the
tax
break? They could use the extra money to spend on buying GE products.
GE
would then have to invest to meet increased demand. Why do the rich
folks
and the corporations always get the breaks under the Republican schemas
if
tax breaks not only work at the middle class level, but perhaps even
better?

Again look at the actual figures. First of all, the Bush tax cut was
a set %age across the board and actually took a bunch of people off the
roles entirely. Aroun 43% of all households pay NO tax. Both the
percentage of total (federal) taxes paid and the percentage of income
taxes paid went up for the top 10%. Heck the bottom two quintiles
actually pay a negative tax meaning they get more back in credits, etc,.
than they paid in.

That knife cuts both ways. Do you think anyone at the lower end of the
income scale benefited at all from the reduction of the estate tax? That
break was only for the rich and as I recall, it meant a significant loss of
revenue for the Treasury. I don't need to tell you the difference between
progressive and regressive taxation. As for the bottom two quintiles, you
really wouldn't want to be there, even if you got tax credits. My point was
that in order to stimulate the economy, lowering taxes for the people that
buy consumables gives them more money to spend which goes to corporations
selling goods which increases their profits. Lowering taxes for the highest
earners is far more likely to result in them investing or sheltering that
money abroad, which doesn't help restart the stalled economy very much at
all.

It's morally bankrupt to take the savings and tax money of people who
did
nothing risky or wrong and use it to lavishly reward those that did. I
guess I abhor the freemarketeers who clamor "No interference" and then
travel hat in hand (on private jets) to ask the very government they
despise
to pay for their mistakes. How is the freemarket operating when their
true
fate should have been the bankruptcy auction block?

Me too. But we have a long and cherished and bipartisan history of
privatising the profits and socializing the losses.

Privatising? Are you turning Brit on us? (-: Seriously, though, unless
that cherished tradition is hacked to death, we'll go on letting mergers
thin out the competitors until we end up bailing out the remaining
businesses that we've allowed to become too big to fail.

What kept the nation's economy from collapsing in 2008? The much
maligned
Federal government with the taxes it had collected. Small government
could
never counterbalance the idiot things business seem to do decade after
decade. Even Warren Buffet said that government needs to be larger than
any
one business sector for precisely that reason. Yet what choice did Bush
and
Obama have when, after years of the anti-trust dept. at DOJ licking
their
anuses like malfeasant bored dogs, banks grew to be "too large to fail?"

Not with the taxes they collected. That is a big part of the
problem.

Well, ostensibly with taxes collected. Obviously we've borrowed to make
those payments, but the principle remains the same. Who would be in a
position to a) borrow that much money and b) lend it to a company nearly in
extremis other than the Federal government?

If Obama came out for apple pie, mom and clear blue skies, I believe a
large
number of Republicans would find reasons to condemn all three. A lot of
what we see here in the world and here in AHR, especially with the
veiled
death threats and such, indicates politics has become reflexively
partisan
with not a lot of intellectual horsepower being applied. I wish I knew
how
to stop that, but it may be a process that once started doesn't stop
until
very bad things happen.

And if Bush so would the Dems. That is more an indicator of the fact
that neither party is really under adult supervision at this time.
Making matters worse.

That's the bottom line - that there's no adult leadership. As an
independent I have to say that I believe there's a lot more overt hatred of
Obama than there was of Bush. Whether that's attributable to occult racism,
I can't say. But the clamor of claims of a stolen 2000 election seem to
have died out long before the cult of the Birthers which by all accounts is
still going strong.

What saddens me the most about modern American is how woefully uninformed
people are about current events. Newspapers are dying not only because of
"bust out" schemes perpetrated upon them by takeover firms, but because
people just don't seem motivated to learn enough to be educated voters. I
am reluctant to look up how few people read a paper or watch TV news
anymore.

It's clear from the adverts in both that only the Geritol set watches the
news anymore. That's why so many people believe the crazy things that
"interpreters" tell them, hence the birthers, the blame placed on the CRA
for the entire real estate bubble and other odd, nearly cultish beliefs that
propagate through our society.

Our growing national ignorance is why people can claim a bomb and not a
plane caused the damage at the Pentagon on 9/11 even though you can easily
find footage from the parking lot's CCTV cameras showing the impact of the
plane. It doesn't matter if their theory gapingly fails to answer what on
earth happened to the missing jet. I'll bet some believe it went through an
"Event" type portal to another universe. I blame part of the American
appetite for conspiracies on the JFK assassination and all the questions it
left unanswered. People who grew up in that era are likely to see
"shooters" behind every bush.

In this day and age facts seems to be on an equal footing as pie-in-the-sky
conjecture of the wildest sort. Just reading through AHR it's quite obvious
that people just talk past each other, demeaning others that hold opposing
views and keeping their minds tightly closed to new ideas. Debate has given
way to derision and discussion to dogma.

Maybe countries suffer from a "hardening of the arteries" with age just the
way people do. )-:

--
Bobby G.